SOUL
SURVIVORS

Director: Steve Carpenter

Starring: Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Luke Wilson

Soul
Survivors is about a bunch of teenagers (including Buffy the
Vampire Slayer star Eliza Dushku) whose lives are shattered in a
traumatic car crash that might – or might not – have had fatal
consequences (it’s all pretty muddled).

The
film, which has a similar feel to Final Destination, tries hard
to offer something different from the slew of I Know What You Did
Last Summer clones, and, to be fair, it occasionally succeeds. It
will probably have enormous appeal to the Dawson’s Creek generation,
but won’t cut ice with genre fans that have heard of Jacob’s
Ladder.

The
UK retail DVD has a first class 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, an airy 5.1
audio mix (at 448kbps), and a good selection of bonus materials (about
half an hour’s worth) including a couple of deleted scenes, an
alternative ending and a couple of short documentaries (including a
promotional piece masquerading as a Making of… featurette). The
rest of the extras are equally disposable, including a ten-minute
pseudo-Spinal Tap-style documentary about a band that provided
music for the film. The best feature is a presentation of three scenes
where you can toggle back and forth between the storyboards and the
finished scene using the angle function. It’s all pretty academic: not
only is the UK disc is missing some of the features on the Region 1
disc, (including a “selected scenes” commentary from one of the lead
actresses, which runs for about a third of the film), but the 12
certificate UK version is not the extended R-rated version offered on
the US disc. There’s not an awful lot of difference between the two
versions (the US version features some more skin, a bit more blood, and
a steamier lesbian clinch between Ms. Dushku and Angela Featherstone),
but it effectively makes the UK disc completely redundant.

Unless
explicitly stated, DVD screen captures used in the reviews are for illustrative
purposes only, and are not intended to be accurate representations of the DVD
image. While
screen captures are generally in their correct aspect ratio, there will often
have been changes made to the resolution, contrast, hue and sharpness, to
optimise them for web display.